#Rules for monopoly deal for free#

It's likely invaluable to people in their field, especially for those qualified to gauge the trustworthiness of an individual study.ĪrXiv could definitely build some kind of trust system like that if they were interested, but I really think their primary audience is experts who don't have a need for a trustworthiness score simple enough for a layman. It just has different goals, from my limited knowledge. They derive value from being open rather than from being trustworthy.ĪrXiv definitely has value as well, I don't mean to imply that it doesn't or is bad in some way. 'This paper is on arXiv' doesn't imply the same level of trust that being in a journal does. I would imagine a society with 0 standards loses subscribers pretty quickly.ĪrXiv could certainly do the same thing, but my impression is that arXiv is more focused on making papers available than being an authoritative entity on anything. The society is focused on funding and income, which is largely predicated on them being trustworthy (theoretically), which gives them an incentive to provide quality peer reviews. This is indirectly useful to my thinking. > I have no first-hand experience, but my intuiting would be that a lot of the gatekeeping these societies do is focused on reputations, organizational hierarchies, and funding considerations. There's value in that heuristic, even if it's not perfect. I'm not a marine biologist, but I can defer to the NOAA. I don't know anyone or anything in rocket science, but I can defer to what NASA says. I don't work in sociology, so I have no idea who is a reputable sociologist, but I have some degree of confidence that the peer reviewers they choose aren't total quacks. These societies unify the diffuse expertise of who knows how many people. I can defer to the opinion of experts, though. I am implicitly not qualified to gauge the quality of peer reviews, because I can't gauge the paper itself. as a layperson, I'm not particularly qualified to gauge the quality of an arbitrary paper. There are certainly other ways of getting to the same thing, but what I think a peer review process in isolation lacks is a sense of trustworthiness of the peer review. > Can you be specific about what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process outside of their purview? So what do they do? Because it looks just like a system that is really good at extracting money from academia and governments.

#Rules for monopoly deal for free#

They charge $30-$200 for a paper, on a shitty difficult to navigate website, where many open platforms like arxiv, openreview, and various *xiv host these works for free and are quite searchable with open APIs and many tools for easier navigation. They don't pay area chairs, metareviewers, or others. That time either comes from the academic institutions, gov money, or generally 'free time'. I really just do not see what they offer to us as researchers. They also discourage replication studies, which is the cornerstone of science, as well as surveys, opinion papers, and more. It also incentivizes 'novel work' but work that isn't too novel because highly novel methods are often not effective at first despite being worth exploration. As far as I can tell, they only provide a metric that can be used by governments and academic institutions to evaluate their employees, but this gets noisier and noiser by the year. Scale makes them unable to effectively weed out low quality work (process is always noisy, scale increases noise).

They have never been able to validate works (despite the public perception thinking that's what they do). They are no longer needed for distribution. But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally.īut what is the utility that they provide? > I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them. But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally. I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them, but on the other hand maybe the best system doesn't include a central institution responsible for shaping the field. My opinion: Kinda seems like it boils down to a conflict between wanting an open and centralized system. The author frames this as opposing open science and they allude to other integrity problems in academia such as plagiarism and cheating. The ASA says this is bad because it removes the source of funding for peer review so there will be negative effects on academic integrity. Currently there is a 12 month delay before they need to release which allows them to generate revenue via subscriptions.

This is a highly opinionated article against recent ASA opposition to a law that would require them to release taxpayer funded research publications for free immediately. I found it difficult to glean the high-level points of this article without reading the whole thing.